Carole Condé & Karl Beveridge

About the Artists

Carole Condé and Karl Beveridge are artists who work collaboratively and who have lived in both Canada and the United States. They spent time working with an international group of Conceptual artists before devoting themselves, beginning in the late 1970s, to collaborating with trade unions and community organizations in the production of their staged photographic work. These artworks have been exhibited across Canada and internationally in both the labour movement and in art galleries and museums. Condé and Beveridge are active in several labour-arts initiatives, including the Mayworks Festival in Toronto and the Workers Arts and Heritage Centre in Hamilton, Ontario. In 2016, Gallery TPW featured video, photographic, and audio work by Condé and Beveridge in the group exhibition “Working Conditions,” including a reprint of their Art Gallery of Ontario publication …It’s Still Privileged Art (1975).

About The Work

This photograph is excerpted from a series of nine entitled Art Is Political. The images depict Condé and Beveridge in dialogue as they dramatically stage their own transformation from participants in a rarified art market to contributors in a socially-engaged art community. We speak metaphorically of the “complicated dance” of such debates, which the artists have rendered literal through exaggerated poses; these are bodies in dialogue. A montage of performance and text, this image (and the series it comes from) is emblematic of a long and widely admired career spent working collaboratively to shape and narrate social justice movements and workers’ struggles.